First Ansible's London Meetup

I attented the first London ansible meetup and I wanted to share the few things I’ve learnt over there.

TL;DR: Ansible is S-I-M-P-L-E that’s why you should try using it.

Ansible VS Puppet

One of the talk was about how to move from Puppet to Ansible. At Theodo we use both to provision our servers, as an active member of the Ansible team I was quite excited to discover some new pro Ansible arguments.

So Ali Asad Lotia explained why they moved from Puppet to Ansible in his company.
Their goals were mainly to simplify the process. This talk from Rich Hickey have convinced them about the importance of simplicity.

One of the main problem when using Puppet is the awful log error.

Why they have chosen Ansible?

Minimal requirements
Small composable module set
Use of ssh
Infrastructure as configuration

Their Early Observations

No setup
Module's name map to commands
Failure on error \o/
Easier to read
Lower maintenance

Greg’s show

The last talk was a speech of the very sympathic and funny Ansible’s community guy, Greg DeKoenigsberg with a long questions/answers session.
Mainly everybody was enjoying Ansible because of his simplicity. I have probably heard “Ansible is so simple” a hundred times (per minute).
One question was what is the main purpose of using Ansible? The answer from Greg is that Ansible is an automation tool so it can be used to automate anything not only the provisioning of a server.
One problem that my french neighbor had was that he can not check the compliance of his servers with Ansible as it can be done with Puppet. The answer from Greg was Ansible Tower!
Finaly I’ve asked a question about how the Ansible’s team see Ansible Galaxy. For Greg, it’s just a tool that centralized public Github Ansible’s roles. It hasn’t the goal to become
a composer/npm like service.

That’s it for this meetup. You can check out my roles on Ansible Galaxy or those from my colleague Simon

If you have any questions, you can comment this article or poke me on twitter!